and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, feight in his imagination." Jonson's fortunes seem to have suffered little abatement until the death of King James, in 1625. Then declining popularity and declining health combined their malice to break the veteran down; and the remaining twelve years of his life were passed in doing battle with those relentless enemies of poets,--want and disease. The orange--or rather the lemon--was squeezed, and both court and public seemed disposed to throw away the peel. In the epilogue to his play of "The New Inn," brought out in 1630, the old tone of defiance is gone. He touchingly appeals to the audience as one who is "sick and sad"; but, with a noble humility, he begs they will refer none of the defects of the work to mental decay. "All that his weak and faltering tongue doth crave Is that you not refer it to his brain; That 's yet unhurt, although set round with pain." The audience were insensible to this appeal. They found the play dull, and hooted it from the stage. Perhaps, after having been bullied so long, they took delight in having Ben "on the hip." Charles the First, however, who up to this time seems to have neglected his father's favorite, now generously sent him a hundred pounds to cheer him in his misfortunes; and shortly after he raised his salary, as Court Poet, from a hundred marks to a hundred pounds, adding, in compliment to Jonson's known tastes, a tierce of Canary,--a wine of which he was so fond as to be nicknamed, in ironical reference to a corpulence which rather assimilated him to the ox, "a Canary bird." It is to this period, we suppose, we must refer his testimony to his own obesity in his "Epistle to my Lady Coventry." "So you have gained a Servant and a Muse: The first of which I fear you will refuse, And you may justly; being a tardy, cold, Unprofitable chattel, fat and old, Laden with belly, and doth hardly approach His friends, but to break chairs or crack a coach. His weight is twenty stone, within two pound; And that 's made up, as doth the purse abound." As his life declined, it does not appear that his disposition was essentially modified. There are two characteristic references to him in his old age, which prove that Ben, attacked by palsy and dropsy, with a reputation perceptibly waning, was Ben still. One is from Sir John Suckling's pleasantly malicious "Session of the Poets":-- "The first that broke silence was good old Ben, Prepared before with Canary wine, And he told them plainly he deserved the bays, For his were called works where others were but plays. *....*....*....* Apollo stopped him there, and bade him not go on; 'T was merit, he said, and not presumption, Must carry 't; at which Ben turned about, And in great choler offered to go out."